Eu: Together and Apart

Together and apart: the EU since Maastricht In 1946, out of the devastation of post-war Western Europe, Sir Winston

1

Churchill remarked that Europeans needed a “United States of Europe” to facilitate rebuilding and prevent future conflict. Starting in 1951, six nations, less Churchill’s England, began the process of creating a union: a union that would reject Churchill’s idea in part. The founding states would join together, but not as a federation subsuming state sovereignty under a supranational organization; rather, they formed a union of sovereign states. Since 1993, when the Treaty of Maastricht (also known as the Treaty of the European Union (EU)) came into effect, the question over how far the EU will integrate remains. This paper will evaluate the EU integration process in the postMaastricht era with a focus on the failure to pass a constitution in 2005 even though ideas contained in the draft constitution were accepted four years later in the Treaty of Lisbon. It will be argued that the EU members have chosen to curtail supranational organization in favor of protecting state sovereignty. Moving together: the Maastricht Treaty, 1993 The formation of the European Coal and Steel Committee in 1951 preserved each of the six-member state’s ability to have control over its laws and people, or sovereignty. Integrationists, politicians who wanted a federal form of government lost out to nationalists, those who wanted to protect their own states from a federal union. Thus, integration was limited to economic issues for which the states could “achieve limited and specific results” (George, Frantz, and Birmele1997, 116). According to Boyka Stefanova (2005) the concept of integration contains a key contradiction – the end result of integration is a supranational organization, yet the

2

process of integration means sovereignty is only gradually and partially turned over (52). Nonetheless, the...